[Description] Please share widely. Time: 6 pm Date: Thursday May 2, 2013, Place: Lucile H. Bluford Branch of the Kansas City, MO Public Library, 3050 Prospect Avenue, Kansas City, MO 64128. What: Soul Food Junkies documentary by Byron Hurt. Discussion to follow focusing on the health impact of our industrialized, corporate global food system and what policy options we can work on to change this such as taxing fast and processed food, putting age and location restrictions on fast food establishments, and many other options such as used against the tobacco industry. More Detail: Soul Food Junkies is an hour long, loving, humorous, recent documentary exploring "Soul Food," the traditional American cuisine of the Southeastern US and Americans of Black African descent and what role it has played in our health. While filmmaker, Byron Hurt, entitles this film "Soul Food Junkies," he concludes that it is fast food and our industrialized, corporate food system that is the root cause of our nation's (and in fact our globe's) ill health, i.e., diabetes, heart disease, cancers, kidney disease and hypertension epidemics. Furthermore, it is well established that both Fast Food and the industrialized corporate food system target Americans of Black African descent as well as Latino folks and poor folks with unhealthy food, contributing to these groups experiencing higher rates of these epidemic diseases. Fast Food: Oppression through Poor Nutrition. Salt, Sugar and Fat, Michale Moss. Food Fight, new video. As Missouri University's Dr. Mary Hendrickson and others write in their paper Global Food System: Nine Nodes of Power, a globally integrated food system has emerged in recent decades, where a few firms dominate in certain agriculture and food sectors, from inputs for food production to where farmers sell their raw agricultural products, to where consumers shop for groceries. In his new book,Salt, Sugar, and Fat, Michael Moss, discusses how this system and these large corporations have intentionally made their food products as addictive as possible to guarantee market share and make profit. He also describes ow these corporations have targeted particularly poor people nationally and globally with deadly and addictive food products by producing them to be cheaply available. Many of these folks targeted cannot afford the medical care necessary to treat these unhealthy food diseases and so suffer more deaths from these conditions as well . Black Americans who suffer a higher rate of poverty also experience the highest rates for death from Cancer than do any other racial or ethnic group in the US for example. Globally, most of all deaths from diabetes are in low and middle income countries including all of Sub Saharan Africa. Despite our government's recognition of the disastrous health consequences of fast and and the heavily processed food produced by the global, industrialized, corporate food system that Dr. Hendrickson and her colleagues identify, our government continues to exacerbate the impact of these "foods" by heavily subsidizing and promoting them rather than fresh vegetables and fruits which the government has itself identified are better for our health, and by permitting the global, industrialized, corporate food system system to exert disproportionate influence over the direction of government food, agriculture and health policy. As an example, witness the current legislation being called the "Monsanto Biotech Rider "or the Monsanto Act" which not just allows but requires the secretary of agriculture to grant permits for planting or cultivating Genetically Modified crops – even if a federal court has given an injunction against it. Solutions: 6 $25.00 gift certificates for a local grocery store will be raffled off at the end of the meeting to those most affected by this system
